Show Notes
Send me a message at ben@iheartthispodcast.com. Tell me about your favorite walks in the woods.
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This story about John Muir can be found in many sources, but my favorite is the one as told by Lee Stetson in his Evening with John Muir one-man stage production that I first saw in Yosemite Valley when I was 12 years old.
Carlos Castaneda, for those who don’t know, was a cult-leader who passed off a fictional account of an apprenticeship with a “sorcerer” as fact. Originally published as a master’s thesis at UCLA (ha!), The Teachings of Don Juan centered on peyote-induced hallucinations and captured the imaginations of the 1960s counterculture. But I still love this quote. Just goes to show that even charlatans can get it right sometimes … even if just by accident.
Transcript
Today, I want to give thanks for walking in the woods.
And, note of clarification, when I say “walk in the woods” I’m also talking about walking in canyons and deserts and rocky mountain peaks and paddling alone through the mangroves. But the woods of New England are what I know, and so, forgive me if the language I use is specific to them.
Now, I don’t think anyone would disagree with the idea that woodsy rambles are nice. Most people find foliage to be pleasant. They get excited to catch a glimpse of deer. But for me, walking in the woods has been more than just a contemplative passtime. It’s been profound, something … sacramental. If the “I Heart This” podcast is a series of thank you notes, today’s podcast is not a dear-aunt-marge-thanks-for-the-sweater kind of thank you note. It’s more of a hallelujah-I-can-never-repay-this-undeserved-grace.
Let me start with a story.
***
I was in high school when it happened. Junior year, I think. I had been practicing a kind of walking meditation for a few weeks. It went something like this: I’d walk very slowly and quietly, feeling the ground with each step before I put weight on my foot. My hands folded in front of me. My eyes, soft. I would relax my vision so that nothing came into hard focus, and my attention was tuned to no one particular thing so that I could take in the whole landscape all at once. It was easy to catch the motion of a bird or squirrel even on the periphery of my vision.
It was late March … overcast … cool. I can remember the spirals of frost on the railing of our deck. I walked my little meditative walk to the pond at the edge of the woods. I had no destination. That was part of the practice–to let my heart take me in whatever direction it would.
The wind had been strange that day, with brisk gusts that would come out of nowhere and then disappear, leaving the air still and quiet for a while, and then another gust would come. And I was standing at the edge of the pond when suddenly one of those gusts of wind came across the water. The next part is hard for me to describe. Well, not the external events, those were plain enough. The surface, which had been a glassy reflection of the sky just a moment before, exploded into arcs of little ripples that raced across the surface. It looked like the footsteps of an invisible spirit dance.
What happened inside me though is so much harder to put into words … Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. Nothing quite like it has ever happened since. It was like I became just one giant eye. Like I was transparent. I could feel everything. It was almost like I was everything. Someone had turned the brightness up on the world and every detail appeared in overwhelming, microscopic relief … And none of those descriptions are quite right.
Whatever it was made me momentarily dizzy. I remember falling to the ground and catching myself. My gloved hands rested in the frosty grass and I just stared at them. This almost painfully joyful feeling in my heart.
I have probably spent more of my life thinking of that moment than any other in my life. And I still have no idea what it means. The yogis talk about a mind-state called samadhi, a kind of crazy intense concentration that breaks down the barriers between the self and the divine.
But usually samadhi is only experienced after what Patanjali calls, “devoted practice for a long time.” and that certainly wasn’t true for me. I was seventeen. I was just playing around with meditation. And while the experience totally changed me, it didn’t grant me long-lasting enlightenment. Spoiler alert … I didn’t become a saint. Just ask my students. I’m sure they could provide a comprehensive list of my shortcomings. It turns out that after profoundly altered states of consciousness, you’re still just an average guy.
I’ve been mulling over all of this for a few decades. And in my decided non-expertise, here’s what I’ve taken away: Walk in the woods, quietly and alone … it just wakes you up.
***
Here’s the part where I’m supposed to walk back the extravagances of that story with qualifiers like, “Not every walk in the woods leads to revelation.” But I don’t really believe that. Pretty much every time I walk alone in the woods, I feel like I’m plopped down in the presence of miracles. And even though the psychedelic fireworks don’t go off every time, something inside of me peels open–almost without fail.
And walking in a wild place is the most reliable way that I know of to do that–even more than meditation or yoga or prayer. I don’t think I’m alone in that. Think of vision quests and other rites of passage. Think about poets and philosophers. My man, Hank D. Thoreau “traveled much in Concord.” Walt Whitman took to the open road, afoot and lighthearted. Mary Oliver got saved by the beauty of the world. Annie Dillard was a pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Even Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days before his ministry began. When we go out into the wilderness, we are in good company.
***
How does something as simple as walking alone in the woods do this to me? I don’t know any better than the next person, but I have some guesses.
First, this is going to sound funny, but it’s easy to forget how much world there is out there. Wade off into the bushes anywhere and find a suitable rock or stump to sit on and suddenly I’m a guest in a place that has a life of its own. That place doesn’t care about me. It’s not beholden to the imaginary story I call “my life.” Ferns and mosses, ants and beetles, are born, live, and die without any human characters in their lives at all. The work of the world goes on whether there are human eyes there to notice it or not.
I can spend a whole afternoon with my nose in a little nook, watching the dramas that take place in a spider’s web. And then when I stand up at the end and stretch my stiff legs, I see ten-thousand other places where I could have stopped and seem something totally different. How baroque the world is! How ornate! How full of mystery!
Go ahead and try it. Walk two minutes through the forest without coming up against something you don’t know. I dare you not to be wonderstruck. Where was that beetle born? Why does that bird sing? How does a leaf know when to stop growing? Why did the delicate little needles of this snowflake form so differently from the one next to it? How can the world ever be boring when we are neck-deep in the unknown?
Second, the woods remind me of another thing that is easy to forget … this world is not here on your terms. Most of us spend our days in temperature-controlled boxes that fool us into thinking otherwise. But when you’re walking in the woods, the truth is in your face. The woods don’t give a snap about your problems. They are cold and wet and mosquitoful. The rocks are sharp. The path is full of thorns. In a few places still, there are creatures that would see you as prey. It’s humbling to remember that you are not the center of the world. On the surface of this round earth, there is no center.
***
You’re probably getting the sense that the walking I’m talking about is different from what most people would call a “hike.” I love hiking the hills around my home with friends and testing myself against a good steep mountain. But the walking that I’m talking about today doesn’t happen on a trail. As Gary Snyder says in his remarkable book of essays, The Practice of the Wild. “ … everything else is off the path. The relentless complexity of the world is off to the side of the trail … for a forager, the path is not where you walk for long.” Life is off trail.
Maybe that’s another reason that these woodsy walks can be so profound. On the trail there are two ways to go, forward and back. But take just a few steps to the side, and suddenly, my possibilities are infinite. There is no limit to which way I can go. This kind of freedom is both terrifying and exhilarating. Step off the trail, and I suddenly remember that every moment is like this. However confined I might feel by habits or expectations, I always have choice.
Finally, stepping off the trail and into the woods makes it undeniably obvious that there is no place to get to. The top of the mountain is no more special than the swamp at the bottom. All of my ambitions and dreams are just that, dreams. Illusions. I invented them. As Carlos Castaneda says in the Teachings of Don Juan, “All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush.” The only question to ask is “Does this path have a heart?”
So maybe the woods work their magic on me because of all these things that I tend to forget: that the world is big, that (within it) I am of little consequence, that whatever limits I put on myself I am ultimately free, and that all my goals are illusions. But that’s not what the magic feels like. Mostly, it just feels like putting myself in the way of beauty and letting it crash over me. The world is a constantly booming thunderwave of mystery, and I just have to get out of my own way to see it.
***
In the spring of 1867, a young Scottish-American immigrant named John Muir was laboring at Osgood, Smith, and Co., a carriage parts factory in Indianapolis. He was shy, devoutly religious, and terribly clever with his hands. A few years earlier, John had had ambitions to graduate from the University of Madison, but his studies had been cut short by the Civil War. And now, 28 years old, with a half-finished college degree and dashed hopes of a medical career, he was being swept up by the Industrial Revolution. He’d made a name for himself by inventing machines of various kinds–clocks and thermometers, gopher traps and sawmills. In one factory he had doubled the daily output of broom handles. You might imagine that, with his mechanical talents, he would be riding the tide of industry to prosperity. But John was a man conflicted. He loved wildflowers and birds and poetry. This frenetic mechanical business, however exhilarating, had no soul.
On the night of March 6, John was using the pointed end of a file to tighten a belt on one of the factory’s machines … and the file slipped … and jabbed him in the eye … through his cornea. The humors of his eye dripped out into his hand. A bystander who witnessed the whole thing reported that John muttered to himself, “My right eye is gone. Closed forever on God’s beauty.” Then, as if in sympathy, the sight faded from his left eye as well.
Can you imagine the anguish he must have felt?
A doctor advised that he might regain his sight if he rested it. And so … John closed himself in a darkened room for a month. A month! No day, no night. No sense of time. No reading. No knowing whether his vision would ever be restored. Just him and his thoughts in the dark.
Can you imagine what it must have been like to emerge from that darkness and find your sight restored?
Can you guess where he went? To the woods. And for hours, John Muir walked through the woods filling himself up with light! He never stopped.
Four months later, John Muir walked out of Indianapolis, never to return to the factory floor. Homeless and nearly penniless, he walked, with a journal and a plant press. For a thousand miles. First to Florida. Then, eventually to the mountains of California where he would become the supposed father of the national parks.
“God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons,” he said. And what was God’s lesson for John? Based on what John did with that lesson, I think it’s something like this. “The walk isn’t just a diversion or a break. Not the thing you do when the real work of life is done. The walk IS the real work. Maybe there is no reason that we are here. But, maybe, being here is reason enough. By whatever grace, we have the chance to spend a life exploring this grand garden. John said it this way, “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”